Shane has spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and uses a powerchair. Hannah is “able bodied” and stereotypically attractive. Hot, even. They make videos on everything from the cutesy nicknames they have for one another to answering questions from the public about their sex lives. Nothing is not up for discussion with these two.
Recently, the couple partook in a viral TikTok trend: the “I didn’t make the Olympics” category saw more than 49 million posts from people mocking their lack of swimming skill. Videos include divers hitting the bottom of a pool, people struggling to dog paddle, and a swimmer toppling off the diving block before a race.
Squirmy and Grubs posted their own version of the trend, a video superimposed with the words “Sorry to announce I did not qualify for the 2024 Olympic US diving team.” Hannah, holding Shane’s body up with her hands under his armpits, dunks him into the pool she is standing in. We see Shane briefly under the water, motionless were it not for Hannah scooping him almost immediately back to the surface. Then they both smile, and Hannah tells Shane: “I don’t want you to get water in your ear.”
Their clip went viral. Understandably so: their video is funnier than all of the others I browsed in the category. And I could have even agreed with Hannah and Shane about their intention to “change the narrative” on disability—at least on this occasion, where they demonstrated top notch self-deprecating humour—were it not for their ensuing meltdown over the public response to their viral clip.
Less than a week after posting their swim video, Squirmy and Grubs had a serious message to share:
“This one hurts to write, but it needs to be done,” wrote Shane. “We currently have a silly video going viral, which should be cause for celebration. Instead, it’s forcing me to confront the painful fact that literally hundreds of thousands of people hate me and think I’m worthless because of my disability… As of right now, the video has almost 20 million views. In our work, that’s a major success. I should be ecstatic. I should be proud. I should be celebrating. But do you know what makes it tough to feel those things? The comments pouring into the video… The very top comment says, ‘It’s always important to wash your vegetables,’ referring to me as the vegetable. It has 97,000+ likes. That means almost one hundred thousand real humans on this earth agree with this humiliating insult! The next one, with 79,000 likes: ‘I still struggle to see that they are in a relationship.’… There are thousands more just like these. Thousands. I’m tired, guys.”
What did Squirmy and Grubs expect? Truly. What did they expect would happen when they demonstrated that they were okay with joking about and making light of Shane’s drastic physical disability? What do they expect when they’ve gained a popular following precisely because of the fact that it’s extremely unusual to see a beautiful and healthy young woman married to—and taking care of—a severely physically disabled man?
Shane said that he was "forced to confront the painful fact that hundreds of thousands of people hate me and think I'm worthless..." How does he know that? He can’t. The simpler, more likely explanation is that the public believed that since Shane could make a dark joke about his disability, that they could, too. Or that because the couple is comfortable with gaining social media attention by virtue of their physical mismatch, that the public might say something about it—without being accused of bigotry. Now that would be an example of “changing the narrative” on disability.
Squirmy and Grubs play both sides: they bait us for the easy attention and fame that their incongruous physicality brings, but they also want to be seen as serious activists. Look at us, they scream—but no, not like that!
Interestingly, Shane has a history of publicizing how his attractive partner is perceived by the public as his “nurse” rather than his girlfriend; before Hannah, he did the same with another pretty blonde woman named, hilariously, Anna. And then with Hannah, he even wrote a book about it, titled “Strangers assume my girlfriend is my nurse.” This isn’t to say that Shane and Hannah’s marriage is a sham; rather, it’s clear that the two—who do seem a genuine couple—are in the business of being perpetual victims.
There’s nothing fresh about using a niche identity to attention seek—and then using the resulting platform to express how hard done by one is. TikTok is swarming with communities of people doing the same: people with wild, made-up genders, “multiple personalities,” bipolar disorder, persons with Tourette’s… the list goes on.
They all use the same formula: draw people in with outrageous, abnormal, or unusual behaviours or appearances, and then cash in on the dopamine rush afforded by their ongoing victimhood narrative. How boring.
